Alexis D. Negrón-Cruz v. United States

The landmark case of Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U.S. 471 (1972), established due process safeguards for conditional liberty revocation hearings. It outlawed the prior practice by which a parole officer could secure revocation through an ex parte submission and held that revocation proceedings must be decided by a neutral and detached arbiter based on evidence presented at a hearing. Morrissey and its progeny are embodied in Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 32.1 and 18 U.S.C. § 3583. In its opinion below, the First Circuit recognized that the district court had learned new facts ex parte from a fact-witness: Petitioner’s supervising probation officer. The district court then consulted ex parte with that probation officer, the government’s primary fact witness, in assessing both revocation and the appropriate punishment. The question presented is: Does a district court violate the Fifth Amendment’s neutral-and-detached-arbiter requirement, as recognized in Morrissey, when it engages in ex parte communications with a fact-witness probation officer to consider factual allegations and determine the punishment for revocation?